That's my snapshot — which Meade urged me to take — with the "L" in "motherland" buried in the binding. Meade and I take opposite positions on whether this is a terrible ad. He's saying a company wouldn't appropriate Nazi imagery to push a product, and Soviet communism ought to be considered equally toxic.

I observed that the ad is anti-communist, with the headline: "This ain't the motherland, comrade. You have a CHOICE." In the Soviet Union, you had no choice. In America, you have choice! And "CCCP" — normally, a way to write USSR — is redefined as "Custom Color Choice Program."

Meade says it's still wrong, citing the millions of victims of Soviet communism upon whose dead bodies you cannot construct jokes. And I was all: Hey, wait a minute! The reason you wanted me to take the photo is because your right-wing friend has a Santa Cruz bike and you wanted to needle him!"

And thus the conversation gets good enough that I end up feeling like it's bloggable, and now Meade has leveraged my interest in whatever's interesting to the point where he can now needle [unnamed friend] with this blog post.

In looking up the Isaac Mizrahi quote, I found a blogger (Tina Waltke) who had heard the quote before seeing the dress — which you can see at the first link, above — and she was wondering what makes a dress look communist. Her idea was derived from an old Wendy's ad, which basically uses the same "choice" theme that Santa Cruz is using:

Hilarious ad! Now... are we not supposed to do that with communism? I'm saying mockery is great. And we do mock Nazism too (but we never connect a product to Nazism, even to distinguish it from Nazism, the way the Santa Cruz and the Wendy's ad distinguish their product from communism).

IN THE COMMENTS: k said: "I'm pretty sure CCCP was actually USSR in Cyrillic letters. Wasn't it?" And I said: "That's what I thought too... and then I trusted Wikipedia!"

ADDED: I've corrected the original now, and Wikipedia confused me but didn't really get this wrong. I was distracted by the "disambiguation" stuff at the top of the page.

I'm saying mockery is great. And we do mock Nazism too (but we never connect a product to Nazism, even to distinguish it from Nazism, the way the Santa Cruz and the Wendy's ad distinguish their product from communism)

That's Hitler VS Stalin. You were comparing the Nazi VS Soviets. Why the shift? Are you smoking weed again?

Because Hitler slaughtered more than 25 million Soviet citizens (including 15 million plus civilians) in less than four years (June 1941--May 1945, with the vast majority of the killing taking place before fall of 1944, when the Soviets pushed the Germans out of Soviet territory). Stalin was in (uncontested) power from 1927--53. It was during this period that the worst purges and manufactured famines occurred.

"Besides, esthetically, Socialist Realism was much better than any of the horrible art the Nazis produced."

Social realism was better than those damned paintings Hitler liked, and it does work well in graphic design like the Santa Cruz ad, but the Nazis had some high-quality design that would be graphically useful if it were not toxic.

(I'm thinking of the swastikas and banners and armbands and so forth.)

the Communist regime, 1917-1987, murdered about 62,000,000 people, around 55,000,000 of them citizens (see Table 1.1 for a periodization of the deaths)....

I calculate that Stalin murdered about 43,000,000 citizens and foreigners

Another way of looking at this is that the annual risk of a person under Soviet control being murdered by the regime was 1 out of 222. But, compare -- the annual risk of anyone in the world dying from war was 1 out of 5,556, from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day was 1 out of 278, from any cancer was 1 out of 357, or for an American to die in an auto accident was 1 out of 4,167.[1]

Just for perspective.

But the Wendy's ad was funny. Why?

The bike ad a bit off. Maybe becasue we have people walking and encamping around our country who think the Soviet Communists were right?

And where is the comedian Smirnoff these days? The Russians / Soviets laughing at themselves had that real, but bittersweet taste. I can't imagine Germans laughing at the Nazis...

It's in the old Uncle Joe style, but you need a couple of purged apparachiks airbrushed out or a few Red Army types jamming their bayonets into Wehrmacht uniforms for it to have that good old Commie feel.

But, yeah, I see Meade's point.

Freder Frederson said...

Meade needs to lighten up.

Besides, Nazism was a lot worse than Soviet Communism. Hitler killed more Soviet citizens in less than four years than Stalin killed in his entire reign of terror

No, most accounts put Al at 20 mil, but Joe starved or purged about 30 mil before the war, not counting how many he let die during the war because they were mouths he didn't want to feed.

And then, of course, there are all those in Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, who died after the war. Some put Joe's tote at 40 mil all tolled.

Freder Frederson might have someone read to him one of R. Conquest's books or one of the many others that have been written on the hundred plus million who died under the Soviet.

The left has relentlessly avoided complicity in the disaster that was communism and so we find ourselves today with people highly susceptible to the big lie, people like FF who are easily and handily guided and who have little curiousity.

I think the imagery is more likely to cause offense in a static ad/poster/cartoon than a film/video. We have time to get the joke in The Producers / Hogan's Heroes. It would be taking a big chance, but I can see someone using a Downfall parody as an advertisement.

I get the same immediate visceral as Meade from the Santa Cruz ad. Reading the copy and realizing its a joke doesn't completely erase my disgust.

Besides, esthetically, Socialist Realism was much better than any of the horrible art the Nazis produced.

Social realism was better than those damned paintings Hitler liked, and it does work well in graphic design like the Santa Cruz ad, but the Nazis had some high-quality design that would be graphically useful if it were not toxic.

(I'm thinking of the swastikas and banners and armbands and so forth.)

The Krauts were into naked women a lot, NTTAWWT, and spectacle, but, as Ann notes, they also understood how to use visuals (as Trevor Howard said to Edward Mulhare in Von Ryan's Express, "That's what the bloody Boche have - style").

Consider the much-shown clip of the SS troopers marching down a flight of long steps in Berlin (and how Mel Brooks, consciously or not, riffed on it in the production number in the original "The Producers".)

The Commies were always so drab in comparison. That's probably why it's the Hitler Channel and not the Stalin Channel.

The CCCP guys were "scientific." Their Marxist Science explained that murdering the existing leaders, professionals, church officials and teachers would be a requirement for the beginning of man's much desired Redistribution Utopia.

The most deplorable act a government can do is to murder it's own people. The Nazi's and the Soviets were both guilty, but in this respect the Soviets were worse. We expect deaths in war, but we expect our governments to protect us. The soviets failed to protect their own people, and then murdered the survivors.

Of course when you love collectivism, you gotta find a Hitler to make you look even decent by comparison. What would communists do without Hitler to kick around. They should build him a stature or something.

Additionally, there was only one Nazi experiment, while a lot of fools are still trying to this day to prove the serially and thoroughly disproved communist hypothesis. Nazi's aren't the problem.

Discussing the design and artistic preferences of monsters is interesting and another of the ways in which the academy has programmed us to accept the socialist and communist regimes for something they were not and could not have been. Art produced as propaganda is always bad including, or perhaps especially, the are commissioned during the depression. Art that is hijacked for propaganda is diminished as well.

The one criticism I have for the ad is that it's not obvious enough that it's mocking the USSR. The art work is very much an homage to Soviet art, IMO, and there's no mockery there. The mockery is all in the copy, and it should be more obvious.

In the gulags, when the prisoners heard that Stalin had died, they cried. They were convinced that if only Stalin knew of their plight, he would set things straight. I doubt if any concentration camp inmate mourned the passing of Hitler....Stalin reduced his citizens to small, frightened children who clung in desperation and fear to an abusive parent. I don't think the bond of the German peoople with Hitler was so intimate or so total.....Anyway, it does seem that the German people have learned something from their history, but the Russians continue to flounder.

Speaking as someone with relatives who were killed by Russian communists, and who has relatives living in a former Soviet state where the former Communists remain an insidious peril and the Russian threat is not far away,

I agree 110% with Meade. The ad disgusts me. I must not be the target audience.

Yeah, I know they say that this isn't the motherland; but I still associate their product with something negative.

Not so much Stalin's purges; that doesn't really impact my decision on whether to buy a product or not. I've owned a VW, for fuck's sake, and that company was actually started by Hitler himself.

No, the thing that bothers me as a consumer is the association that I now have between their bikes, and poorly manufactured eastern bloc junk. The only thing they ever made well was a tank. I bet their bikes were heavy, the bearings frictiony, the derailleur a slipping rattling tangle of gears and cables.

Freder's math is based on the assumption that it's appropriate to assign complete and unlimited blame for all Soviet war dead to Hitler, and at the same time not assign any non-Soviet war dead to Stalin.

Of course, one could say, just as accurately, "Besides, Soviet Communism was a lot worse than Nazism. Stalin killed more German citizens in less than four years than Hitler did in his entire reign of terror."

Freder will probably try to argle-garble that by arguing that Hitler started the war, assigning full moral responsibility for WWII in Europe to only half the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

You may not believe that the communist philosophy of shared means of production is fair, just, attainable, democratic, etc., but to me, reading here comparisons of communism to Nazism is painful. I lived in postwar Poland -- a country that was torn apart by both a communist regime and, earlier, the Nazis. I doubt that many Poles would find comparing one to the other very apt or helpful.

One other comment - among my Polish friends, mocking Nazism would never be considered funny or appropriate. Mocking Soviet era slogans/art/characterization? All the time.

In the gulags, when the prisoners heard that Stalin had died, they cried. They were convinced that if only Stalin knew of their plight, he would set things straight. I doubt if any concentration camp inmate mourned the passing of Hitler

Beleive it or not, the people in the camps (aside from most Jews) said the same thing, "If the Fuhrer knew about this, he would put it right".

Bikes do seem to go well with Communism. It's estimated that 3/4 of China's population rides a bike regularly.

I'll offer up two highly-scientific reasons why Communists prefer bikes: one, central planners like to keep the proles bunched up in cities as it makes them easier to control, and two, Communist countries usually make very shitty cars. (As Pastafarian alludes to, nobody's ever said 'marvel of Russian engineering' with a straight face.)

nina said...You may not believe that the communist philosophy of shared means of production is fair, just, attainable, democratic, etc., but to me,...

You're right, I don't believe in that philosophy. Even in its purest form of political expression there was always some creepy cult-of-personality guy at the top deciding what those precious shared means of production should produce.

I'll take a capitalist oligarchy any day over those Eastern Euroasian utopias.

For about 20 years after WWII, people who traveled to Europe and had a chance to talk with the locals often heard, "Don't misunderstand, I hate the Germans and what they did here, but the one good thing Hitler did - he got rid of the Jews".

I rise in defense of Soviet engineering. The Soviet Union produced some of the best engineers in the world. They dragged Russia out of the 17th century and produced the best tank of World War II. They moved pretty much all production East of the Urals while constantly increasing industrial output. The Soviet MIG aircraft were emulated by the US. Soviet engineers designed ICBM's that were to be maintained and launched by peasants with an 8th grade education. They invented portable bridging technology. The AK47 has had more impact on the world than any other firearm. It isn't the finest or most delicate that demonstrated the best engineering but the best suited to its uses.

El Presidente, I yield to your intimate knowledge of Soviet Russia, and sorry for that whole exploding cigar thing, but weren't the Moskviches and Volgas completely homegrown Russian cars? AutoVAZ was the line from Fiat. And is it true that the only thing worse than the cars were the roads?

Stalin killed anywhere from 30 to 50 million of his own people from 1927 to 1953. The Nazis did kill far less, but they only had 1941-1945 to do it in. Hitler & Himmler's plan was to exterminate the Slavic peoples over the next 20-30 years through slave labor.

"Of course when you love collectivism, you gotta find a Hitler to make you look even decent by comparison. What would communists do without Hitler to kick around. They should build him a stature or something."

Socialists and Communists have got to be grateful for Hitler - he's the greatest distraction from their own crimes. Had he not existed, they'd have to create him.

My biggest delight in this is that Meade watches Project Runway, however peripherally. I'm completely captivated by it and I fell off my chair laughing when Misrahi made the Communism comment. I'd love to be best girlfriends with any of the last 3 designers, but I'm too butch.

Also, we invented "mountain biking" in the woods of Indiana on our Schwinn one-speeds in 1964. We didn't call it mountain biking. We just called it riding our bikes in the woods.

Mountain biking was practiced in Madison in the very early 70's. There used to be a kick-ass downhill trail through the woods starting from the corner of Allen Blvd and University Ave (behind where that Imperial Gardens restaurant is now) and leading down to the lake at Marshall Park or "The Lagoon" as we used to call it.

Tim, several years ago I had a huge blast on a borrowed original Bontrager steel hardtail - riding the singletrack in Marin - the Boy Scout Camp, Mt. Tam, and the Bay Ridge Trail. We may have invented the sport in Indiana and Wisconsin, but you are clearly blessed with some of THE prettiest trails in the world, out there in the Golden State.